Five places worth visiting

What these five have in common is not what they publish, but where. Each lives at a name its owner controls, and each got there a different way. The routes are the reason they are here.

Two are Magic Pages customers, marked below.

kottke.org – Jason Kottke registered this in December 1998 and has published there ever since. Not moved onto it, not migrated. He started there, and he is still posting daily. The footer still reads “home of fine hypertext products since 1998”. Blog platforms arrived and left. So did social networks, and then the newsletter boom. All of it happened alongside one man at his own domain, writing.

theapiarist.org (hosted by us) – A scientist in Scotland, writing about bees since 2013, now around a million words in. What earns it a place is one paragraph on his about page: no advertising, no merchandise, no affiliate links, no sponsored posts, and no equipment accepted in return for a favourable review. Anything he reviews he bought himself, out of what he calls “the meagre profits from my honey sales and talks”. Since 2024 the site has had paying readers, which he calls sponsors, and he writes that they are what make it sustainable. That he had to start charging is the most useful thing on this page, and I’ll come back to it later.

republik.ch – A Swiss magazine for politics and culture, crowdfunded in April 2017 and publishing since January 2018. It is a cooperative, funded by more than thirty thousand subscribers, and it puts its annual accounts online. Its own description of who owns it was the clearest sentence in all of this research. “Wir gehören niemandem – aber jedem unserer Mitglieder ein bisschen.” We belong to nobody, but a little bit to each of our members.

pluralistic.net – Cory Doctorow calls his method POSSE, for Post Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere. He writes the day’s post here, then reformats and republishes it as a newsletter, a Medium post, a Tumblr post and threads on two social networks. The site carries no trackers and no advertising, and its privacy policy says it collects no data at all. Everything on those other platforms is a copy. This is the original.

dispatch-media.com (hosted by us) – Jacob Furedi launched Dispatch on 1 April 2025 with a piece arguing that this was the worst possible moment to start a magazine of long reportage. Then he asked what if it was also the best. About a hundred and forty pieces since, roughly twice a week, paid for by readers. It is the youngest thing here by years rather than months, and that is why it is on the list: the road is still open, and somebody took it last spring.

Kottke never left, because he never joined anything to leave. The Apiarist refuses the advertising economy outright, and puts the refusal where you can read it. Republik answered the ownership question in its founding documents. Doctorow treats his own address as the original and everything else as a copy. Dispatch started anyway.

The Apiarist’s sentence is the honest counterweight to all of this. Owning your address pays for nothing. It won’t find you readers, and it won’t keep the lights on. He has been at it for thirteen years, a million words in, and still had to start charging to keep it going.

Every publication on this list worked. That is the flaw built into choosing five places worth visiting: I can only point you at the ones still standing, and neither of us knows how many people did the same thing and stopped.

So what these five share is smaller than independence — yet it’s worth having anyway. Any of them could decide tomorrow to change the software, the host and the entire way the thing works.

You’d still find them at the same address.